I know. That’s not a hugely shocking headline. But, we thought you’d like some insight into what we’ve observed in the past few days.

Shortly after the launch of Music Xray’s new tip jar feature, over one thousand online tip jars were created and a flurry of tweets and Facebook posts were sent by musicians in efforts to drive fans to hear new tracks and consider leaving a tip. Exactly our intention!

The result?; pretty much what we already knew. Traffic driven by musicians to their tip jars was paltry by anyone’s measure. In the ensuing 24 hours, the tip jar that received the most traffic received fewer than 200 visits and the next most visited tip jar received fewer than 20.

We know this will improve dramatically in the coming days as musicians begin including a link to their tip jar in their newsletter and really begin engaging their fans in the most effective ways. But, in terms of social media and flash efforts, this speaks to two issues musicians face.

A lack of fans.

The inability to mobilize the fans they do have.

Fortunately, we’ll soon be launching Fan Match, a service to help musicians identify and acquire new fans. In the meantime, keep pushing those tip jars. We love to see you compensated for your efforts and we are seeing tips occur and that’s very encouraging!

As part of Music Xray’s new Fan Match service, every artist account will now have its very own tip jar. The tip jar will have it own URL so you can link to it from anywhere, tweet it, post it on Facebook, mail it… you name it – and you’ll be able to set it along side any one of your tracks when you send it to your fans to hear.

In other words, whenever you send a new song out to your fans, your tip jar can go right along beside it.

If fans decide to tip you, instead of simply choosing a dollar amount (which might result in 50 cent tips), there is a dropdown menu with fun little icons that represent items we musicians like to receive, and the typical cost of those items, including the average cost of a song submission to an industry professional via Music Xray.

Yes. Now your fans can help you offset the cost of forwarding your career! They can even set their tips to recur monthly!! We thought you’d like that!

You see? It’s a fun and nice way to encourage those who support to, well, show their support.

You can customize your tip jar as well by disabling items you don’t want to appear as tipping options. You can rename the cheeseburger to veggie burger if you’d like. It’s a fun little way of passing the hat online that we think can really make a difference each time you send a new song to your fan base. Hey, we all know how hard it is to make a living these days as a musician and we think your true fans will be more than happy to show you a little love in the form of an occasional tip.

It’s important for us to manage expectations, so we want to be up front with you that PayPal charges about 5% for transaction costs. You know, because they make it possible for people to tip with their credit and debit cards. Don’t worry, we’re working with them to keep costs to a minimum. It’s also not free to keep the lights on here at Music Xray and feed our developers who build this complex stuff. But, we’ve figured out a way whereby we also don’t have to take more than 5%. Hey, if PayPal can make it work with such a small margin, we figure we can too. Now, we know no one likes to give up 10% of their tips but it’s not a bad deal when you figure it provides you with a way to pass the hat (uh, make that “jar”) worldwide.

We’d love to know what you think so leave us some comments. We’ll be launching it in a few days. Would you use it when introducing a new song or perhaps when circulating an old favorite to your fans?

A year ago, Music Xray and Soundcloud partnered to automatically match Soundcloud users’ tracks to real music industry opportunities. In that time, 2,176 Soundcloud musicians have been selected for opportunities on Music Xray. That’s 35.7% of the SoundCloud musicians who made submissions in that timeframe! That kind of success rate in unheard of!

Isn’t this what independent musicians have been asking for since the dawn of the rock era? A level playing field? One that doesn’t depend upon who you know and who you can get access to? One that depends solely on talent, skill, and your artistic ability?

Let’s say you have a trusted friend who has all sorts of contacts in the music industry and knows of all sorts of opportunities. Suppose he tells you that he has some time to go to Los Angeles tomorrow on your behalf and get a bunch of decision makers to sit down and listen to your best track.

He can’t guarantee they will love what they hear but he can guarantee they will listen and that they will provide an answer one way or another whether or not they can license your music, sign your band, or perhaps keep it on file for future opportunities. You don’t have to spend weeks or months to find the opportunities or network your way in. Your friend has already done that. He’s also verified that the people he’s meeting with are legit and that the opportunities are real.

Holy crap! Right?

When I was growing up playing in bands I’d have given up anything for a friend like that!

On his list he has a Grammy nominated producer named Rob Epitome who is a hired ear for Cher, Rhianna, and Interscope Records. Your friend can also get your music to the desk Ernesto Elias at MTV. They license about 250 songs per week for their various shows. Then, he can drive over to Arthouse Entertainment, a company founded by renowned hit songwriter and former American Idol judge, Kara DioGuardi and who have been represented on the Billboard Top Ten albums chart with songs and productions on Bruno Mars (Doowops & Hooligans), Cee-Lo (The Lady Killer), Carrie Underwood (Play On), The Band Perry (The Band Perry), Britney Spears (Circus), Pink (Funhouse), Katy Perry (One of the Boys), Sugarland (Love on the Inside), Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus (Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus), and David Archuleta’s self-titled debut.

After that, your friend can take your music right into the office of Jeff Blue; you know, the guy responsible for signing Macy Gray, Daniel Powter, Linkin Park, and who just signed a band called w.e.r.m. to Universal Republic. He can then take your music in to the A&R department at Epic Records (Sony) and even to music supervisor Mike Turner, who is working on a new film staring Lindsey Lohan and he needs music.

Lastly, he’s going to take your music into Grammy-winning producer Jeff Bova’s office to see what kind of feedback he can get on your music and what he might do to polish it up a bit (if needed) and maybe get a few contacts from him as to who else might be seeking tracks like yours.

This isn’t going to cost you much; just your friend’s plane ticket (economy class) to Los Angeles. Let’s say he lives in Nebraska. He just checked. If he leaves tomorrow (Wednesday) and comes back on Friday, the cost of the trip will be $196.

You’ll need to pick up the $100 tab for a cheap motel and the $150 for the rental car. Then let’s say you feel bad for the guy and you want to give him $50 for fast food while he’s out there and even though the value of his contacts, researching the opportunities, and the fact that he has the clout to walk right into their offices and guarantee they will listen to your music is arguably worth many thousands of dollars and took your friend half his career to establish, you’re not going to have to pay him for that. The whole shebang will only cost you $446.00.

Additionally, you’re not going to have to be the guy following up to make sure your music was heard. You get to stay home and continue to make music with the peace of mind that your friend is going to do what he said.

My point with the fiction I just painted is to demonstrate that the bargain-basement dreamworld, “never-gonna-happen” scenario above, still has a real out-of-pocket cost of $446.00. When you put that into perspective, Music Xray, which gets you the exact same result, is incredible value. You see, I used to be in your shoes. I grew up playing in garage bands in rural Nebraska and I didn’t have a friend who could or would do all that for me. That’s why my partners and I started this company and instead of those results costing you $446.00 (which as I pointed out is already insanely cheap), we’ll get all that done for you (every bit of it) for about $180. And you don’t even have to spend it all at once or even pay for any of the opportunities listed above that you’d prefer to skip. Do it at your own pace and pick and choose who you want to hear your music.

And the opportunities and contacts I mentioned above are a tiny fraction of those that are available to you on Music Xray. That’s not even anywhere close to exhausting our Los Angeles-based opportunities let alone those in New York or Nashville, or London…

Isn’t Music Xray what independent musicians have been asking for since the dawn of the rock era? A level playing field? One that doesn’t depend upon who you know and who you can get access to? One that depends solely on talent, skill, and your artistic ability?

For every hour you’ve spent rehearsing in the garage striving to become the king or queen of your genre, someone else has spent thinking about how they can make some easy money from an unsuspecting non-business savvy artist who desires so strongly to be cured of their malady (e.g. musical obscurity) that they will purchase snake oil by the crate.

To those who can’t compose, play or sing, musicians can literally seem magical, mysterious, and they get placed on a pedestal. To achieve that status is considered the ultimate success. The adoration of a large fan base is a sign you’ve made it. At that point, you’re no longer beholden to anyone. Your career is your own. The by-product of that kind of success is money. It may not be primarily what you seek, but you know it will come and it’s what gives you the means to live the rock star lifestyle, which is the crown on your head that unmistakably communicates to everyone that you have made it. You are music royalty.

In short, the music business is aspirational in nature and because the music is so personal and so connected to the ego of its creator (after all, you created it out of thin air and it often reflects your essence, your deepest thoughts and your rawest emotions) that rejection can be excruciatingly painful. Acceptance, even adoration can be incredibly rewarding and addicting. In fact, the pain of rejection and the elation of acceptance are more extreme than in almost any other profession.

That reality is what makes musicians so vulnerable to being scammed. Unscrupulous people know that if they dangle the rewards you seek in front of you and make you feel like they can provide a pathway to success, you will do whatever it takes to achieve it. For every hour you’ve spent rehearsing in the garage striving to become the king or queen of your genre, someone else has spent thinking about how they can make some easy money from an unsuspecting non-business savvy artist who desires so strongly to be cured of their malady (e.g. musical obscurity) that they will purchase snake oil by the create and trade their destiny of becoming music royalty to instead become the palace fool.

This is such a frequent occurrence that many jaded musicians have wizened up. Anyone selling goods and services to musicians, especially non-traditional goods and services (i.e. not guitar strings or vocal training) are met with wary suspicion. Often to the point that a musician’s cynicism won’t allow him to separate a real value proposition from a valueless one.

The level playing field:

That is why Music Xray goes out of its way to not appeal to your emotions. Notice that we’re a little non-sensationalistic. We don’t tell you how great you are. We don’t hype you up and tell you we can make you the next global sensation. In fact, we can be a little bit on the dry side.

We appeal to your common sense. We don’t say things that sound good but that leave you with a nagging internal voice alerting you that something isn’t quite right. We talk about the business aspect of the music business. We work hard every day to weed out the shysters and scammers who might be out there to prey upon you. Then, we help you get your music in front of legitimate industry professionals and real music fans and frankly, we then let the chips fall where they may.

If they like you, you get a deal or a new fan. If they don’t like you or your music, you find out right away and potentially you get some good feedback in the process that helps you improve. The results you get on Music Xray tell you unequivocally whether you are good enough to make it happen and if you discover you aren’t, we give you access to real professionals who can help make adjustments so you can make improvements quickly. Via Music Xray, you can get the kind of feedback and training in far less time than it ever used to take in this business.

Music Xray gets paid for saving you weeks or months finding opportunities or potential fans who will give you a shot. We get paid so you don’t have to jump through hoops to get to a decision-maker.

But remember, rejection is part of the process. Even the best of the best get rejected multiple times before they make it, and that’s likely to happen to you too, even via Music Xray. But by being persistent, by eventually finding the right professional with the right opportunity and by using the feedback you receive to make adjustments to your music and your submission strategy, you will eventually find your way and the lessons you must learn will be far less expensive, far less treacherous, and happen in far less time than has ever before been possible. Scammers are still out there. You will still need to approach your relationships with industry professionals with caution and a healthy dose of business savvy. But our job is to reduce the time and money you spend developing your business and to reduce the likelihood you’ll be taken for a ride.

Music Xray provides a way for you to consistently get the attention of professionals and music fans. What happens after you get their attention depends on your pitch, your music. Music Xray doesn’t care if your music is good or bad. The reaction you get from professionals and fans will provide you with an undeniable verdict.

Before you will pay someone any of your money you must first pay some of your attention. With so many things going on in your increasingly busy life, you have to make some choices. Who gets your attention?

I was walking along a busy sidewalk the other day when a young woman purposefully approached me, smile on her face and clipboard in hand. “Do you have a few seconds, sir?”

This happens to me a lot. It probably happens to you too if you frequent busy sidewalks in big cities. “No”, I replied. I didn’t miss a beat. I didn’t even look back. I have no idea what petition she wanted me to sign. I assume she wanted a donation to one cause or another. The experience was like being spammed by a real live human, except in this analogy I didn’t even read the subject line.

I think most people who know me would say I’m a nice guy. I’m considerate and being from the Midwest, I avoid hurting people’s feelings. But as I’ve gotten busier and the world has gotten faster, there are just way too many things pulling at me for my attention. If I don’t make choices (even eliminating time for some niceties) distractions will overwhelm me.

Maybe this woman had a world-class proposition for me. Maybe whatever she wanted to say would have changed my life. I highly doubt it or I would have stopped. But maybe there’s a one-in-a-million chance.

I’ll never know. She failed to get my attention.

As a musician, your livelihood depends upon you getting the attention of industry professionals and potential fans. How you do that is up to you. But remember, you’re competing.

Music Xray provides a way for you to consistently get the attention of professionals and music fans. What happens after you get their attention depends on your pitch, your music. Music Xray doesn’t care if your music is good or bad. The reaction you get from professionals and fans will provide you with an undeniable verdict.

What most call “promotion” is really just another way of talking about the time, effort, and money spent acquiring fans. Aside from making great music, building an engaged fan base is probably the single most important thing you need to do as an independent musician. Only then will you have true financial independence and artistic freedom. You should change the way you think about promotion and you must invest in developing a fan base. -Mike McCready

In order to know how much you should spend to acquire a new fan (I’m talking about engaged fans, not the random Twitter follower or Facebook “liker”), you should have a rough idea how much an engaged fan is worth to you over the first year, and perhaps over the course of your career.

I realize that can sound unrealistic. But, while not exact, you can make some fairly easy assumptions; like what if 30% of your engaged fans buys each of your new songs or begins listening to them on heavy rotation on Spotify (or the other streaming services)? Then, what if 50% of your fans show up to at least one gig per year. What if 10% of them buy a T-shirt or some other merch item you sell? If you hone your assumptions to the point where they are somewhat accurate (is it really 30% or is it a bit more/less?), you should be able to predict with at least a little precision how much revenue you’ll generate in a given year.

While you’re doing that, you can also estimate your costs that are directly the result of having the fans (amount to make and buy the merchandise, cost of your CDs, cost of distribution to the digital platforms etc.). The amount of money you have left is your margin. As a general rule, as long as you can acquire each fan for less money than you earn on average from each fan, you’re not paying too much. This may sound cold and unlike the warm and fuzzy relationships you actually build with your fans, but this is how you must think of it because it’s your business. You must think about it kind of like you would think about any investment. But the awesome thing about this investment is you have a high degree of control over how it pays off. If you keep making good music, sell creative and quality merch and hold events which your fans can attend (and all sorts of other things), you can create a much more valuable business with fewer fans than another artist might despite having more fans.

Now, imagine you could go into a record label, a publishing company, or a group of independent investors and you were able to tell them how much it costs you to acquire each newly engaged fan and how much an engaged fan is worth.

Imagine being able to say to yourself,

“My band has 100 engaged fans.

“We net about $70 per year on average from each of our fans.

“So, right now, we have revenue of $7,000 per year.

“But, in order to pay ourselves, record the new music, buy some new equipment, and rent a touring van, we need to have $300,000 of revenue in a year.”

If you do that math, you see that you need about 4,185 more engaged fans to generate that kind of money. What should you do? I do realize this is a simplified equation, but you get my point…

Music Xray’s new service, Fan Match was built to help answer this question.

Let’s say you invest $100 in a new Fan Match campaign. The song of your choice will be sent to 300 potential fans – people who have already told us they like your style and your genre. Then, once they’ve heard your music, we give them the opportunity to become a direct fan of yours at the click of a button. When that happens, you receive their email address and can get directly in contact with that fan. You can manage that relationship however you generally manage your engaged fan relationships.

Now, let’s say that your music is compelling enough that 30% of those who hear it like it enough to become a direct fan. That means that for $100, you would acquire 30 engaged fans. In other words, each fan cost you $3.33 to acquire. That’s a really good deal if each engaged fan is worth $70 to you over the course of a year, not to mention the value of an engaged fan over the course of your career.

The point is, you’ll have a projected yearly income of $300,000 if all your assumptions hold true. So, that’s a really good deal!

Obviously, not many struggling musicians have an investible $13,936 on hand. But, if you are able to achieve that on your own, you should.

On the other hand, if you don’t have that kind of cash to invest up front, the good thing about Fan Match is that you can buy small campaigns and see how it goes. Build your base step by step. Learn what works and what doesn’t. You may decide after your first campaign that for the next one, you should use a different song which may acquire new fans more readily and that will drive down your acquisition costs (you’ll acquire more fans for less money). You can do this little by little.

Building an engaged fan base is probably the single most important thing you need as an independent musician. Only if you invest in acquiring one will you ever have true financial independence and artistic freedom. You must invest in developing a fan base. That investment can be made in time (often years), sweat, tears, and money or you can now make that investment via Music Xray. Let us do the heavy lifting and you go back to making great music!.

You can even run small campaigns to test (or prove) your band’s viability. A small Fan Match campaign can be used simply to learn what your fan acquisition costs are and then you can share that information with a label, a publisher, or a group of investors.

Being able to demonstrate your band’s viability in this way, with real numbers, is revolutionary. It’s never been done before and having this kind of information should make it a lot easier to test, identify and demonstrate the merit of investment in the careers of performing musicians and recording artists.

At the very minimum,run a Fan Match campaign simply to find out where you stand. Its is easy for you to acquire fans? If so, keep going. If not, you may need to make some changes or improvements until you’re ready to compete for the attention of music fans. Or maybe you just need to work a different song. We’ve been letting musicians into our pre-launch sessions slowly and to each of you who take advantage of this early offer, we’re giving $25 in credit to spend on submissions plus a lot of personalized attention from our staff as we usher you through your first Fan Match campaign.

This is just a quick note to anyone who has an account as a Fan on Music Xray. That includes those with Artist accounts but who also participate as listeners in Focus Groups.

We’re introducing a major upgrade to our Focus Groups product.

In fact, it’s such an upgrade that we’re changing its name to Fan Match. I’ll tell you all about that below but first, I want to alert you to a change you’ll notice when you log in to your account.

The upgrade requires that you log in and connect your Music Xray account to your Facebook account and grant our application a few permissions. (Click here if you have forgotten your password and need to reset it). The first obvious consequence of this is that in order to continue using your Music Xray Fan account, you must have a Facebook account. I know that will upset some of you. I’m really sorry about that. We are driven to make the best possible product and in this case, integrating some social features simply made the product better and more useful. That is to say, it generates better music discovery for fans and it delivers better fan acquisition data to musicians.

Here’s the thing, although Music Xray appears to be asking for a lot of permissions, these are pretty standard for any app that integreates with Facebook. We’re never going to post anything to your wall on your behalf unless you ask us to (direct posting to Facebook from within Music Xray, but you control the posting). In order for that to work properly, you give Music Xray permission to trigger that post if you request it.

Additionally, the new version of Focus Groups will target you much more precisely based upon your music tastes. We ask you to update your taste information on the following screen (after Facebook integration), but part of the Facebook integration enables our software to stay up to date on your taste trends and listening habits. That way, when we have new music to send you, it will be something as closely related as possible to what you like. Notice the tag line for Fan Match.

Also note, we do not collect any other kind of data nor do we share any data with anyone. The only observer of any of your data is a computer at Music Xray that uses the data to make correlations and connections between songs. It’s pretty cool. You can turn off these permissions at any time in the future if you don’t continue to love Music Xray.

Changes in compensation for listening

In the new version of this product, listeners will still be paid for their participation but we have to do a reset on compensation. With the launch of Fan Match, fans will all start receiving ten cents per listen. Opportunities for increases will be introduced in short succession of version 1 of the product, so stay tuned. I also understand that this change will be upsetting to some of you who have reached the higher badge status and were being paid 45 cents or more per listen. The hard truth is that while useful and interesting for some, Focus Groups wasn’t a compelling product. It wasn’t providing musicians with the kind of valuable feedback we had intended. Focus Groups were performing as intended. It’s just that the feedback they were generating wasn’t earthshattering. Our Focus Groups product was not taking things to the next level for the digital music space. So, in order to correct that, we had to re-imagine the entire product. In so doing, we had to start from scratch and change the angle a bit. To those of you who may feel disappointed, I am sorry. You can delete your account from the “settings” section if you feel you must.

I hope you’ll stick around.

Oh, and one last thing…, Music Xray is growing like crazy but we’re still small compared to where we’ll be soon, especially with all this fan engagement starting to occur on the site. You’ll see a couple buttons on your dashboard. If you like what we’re doing, please click on them! You can earn ongoing affiliate fees, as well as help build Fan Match as one of the best ways to discover new bands and music.

I’m going to delve into a topic we hear about from time to time. It’s when a potential user objects to using Music Xray because they suspect it’s a scam of some sort, or that Music Xray takes advantage of the aspirations of millions of musicians by charging them to take a shot at something they have almost no chance of achieving.

I could go on about all the obvious evidence to the contrary (and I will below this paragraph), but I want to start by saying that the only way you’re going to know with 100% certainty that Music Xray performs as advertised is to give it a try (for free, of course). When you open a free account as an artist, we give you a $4 credit, which enables you to get a free submission. There are many submission opportunities on the site that only cost $4. If you click here and scroll down you can see many of them. At the time of this writing, there appear to be about eighty opportunities of this type. When they say “free”, it means there is no submission fee and you only pay the transaction fee of $4. When you apply your $4 credit that we give you when you open the account, you pay nothing, so you can see for yourself if this thing really works. We’re also giving you a samplefree Fan Match campaign, so you can test our other service out too. If you decide you don’t like them, don’t use them again. No strings. No catches. Really.

So, now let’s address head-on the subject of Music Xray’s legitimacy.

Before Music Xray, getting to a decision maker in the music industry required knowing someone or gaining access to someone, usually through a painstaking networking process that could take weeks or months to pan out. When you did finally get your music into the hands of the decision maker, you frequently had to be the guy or gal following up, calling, asking, “Have you listened yet? What did you think?” Then, in the best of cases, you could only do that so often. It’s not like you had five opportunities like that lined up every day, right?

Sure, there were tip sheets but even after you sent in your CD, bio, pics, etc., you still rarely even received acknowledgement they had been received, let alone received a response in return. That process was also very expensive because while you did all that work, you had to pay rent and feed yourself, not to mention sacrifice time and energy you could have spent doing what you do best; make music.

So, Music Xray has created an online set of tools that A&R professionals, talent buyers, agents, managers, program directors, publishers, music supervisors, and music podcasters use to identify opportunity-appropriate and high potential songs and talent. Once we could demonstrate it was working, we achieved the engagement of a sizable part of the industry; then slowly, we opened the doors to independent musicians everywhere. If you’re just hearing about us, welcome. We’ve been here for a couple years, proving ourselves, getting ready for the big time.

Sure, Music Xray charges a few bucks and we don’t apologize for that. We get a result for you that, via any other means, costs you a lot more time and money. There’s no mystery to it. We are simply able to reduce the time and money it costs by combining some new technology with the efficiencies and capabilities of the Internet. We don’t create the opportunities. We don’t create the music. So, we don’t get paid when a deal between you and an industry professional gets done. Your deals are yours.

Our job is to find the opportunities and bring the industry professionals and decision makers to the table. To do that, we provide them with a compelling set of online tools that helps them do their job more effectively and efficiently – to the extent that professionals who are not using Music Xray are finding themselves at a professional disadvantage vs. those who are. We keep the industry professionals engaged with a great product. The platform we’ve built (and continue to build) is complex and expensive. So is keeping the lights on while providing a second-to-none user support team. Even so, we’re able to keep your costs very low. Due to Music Xray, you can pursue many more opportunities simultaneously and at a lower cost.

We have created a system for musicians via which getting to a decision maker is no longer about who-you-know. Isn’t a level playing field exactly what independent musicians had been demanding for decades? Doesn’t everyone want a sure-fire way of getting their music to the ears of the professionals who matter?

Being able to reach them immediately, at the click of a button, and for a few dollars sure beats the old way. If you don’t think so, don’t sweat it. You don’t have to stop doing it the old way in order to give Music Xray a try.

One day, doing it the old way will seem as strange to people as an accountant in today’s world still using an abacus to calculate their clients’ taxes. Those guys either switched over to new technology or they were long ago outcompeted by accountants using calculators and computers.

If Music Xray doesn’t save you time and money, we’re doing it wrong. Our service is one that reduces inefficiency and creates transparency in an industry that historically has been murky and sometimes completely opaque. Industry professionals and musicians alike are finding Music Xray refreshing. Check for yourself. Do a live Twitter search for musicxray.

If you have questions about Music Xray’s business model, the submission fees, or just think you should never pay anyone to hear your music, click here.

If you have questions about what exactly happens when you submit a song via Music Xray click here.

Lastly, and only to drive the point home, you can see an extensive list of success stories here. Those success stories include major label signings, major motion picture placement, major and cable network television placement, contestants on The Voice who started at Music Xray and so on. Between 50 and 70 songs per day are selected for opportunities via Music Xray EACH DAY.

And if that’s still not enough to adequately answer the question, one can note some of our investors: They include Digital Assets Deployment, True Global Ventures / Dušan Stojanović / David Rose, Wharton Professor Josh Eliashberg, New York investor Hal Vogel and so on. Reputable investors examine companies carefully before investing. They do not invest in companies that are not providing true value or companies they fear may be exposed for operating less than 100% above board. If something like that were to happen, it would ruin their investment. In the meantime, the company would never reach profitability if it didn’t generate satisfied users who find value in the service. Reputable investors wouldn’t touch a company with a ten-foot pole if they suspected it of running a scam.

And that says nothing of the marquee brand name companies that work with Music Xray. MTV, RCA (Sony), Sire (Warner), Parlophone (EMI), The Voice, NBC’s Jimmy Lloyd Songwriting Showcase etc. These are not typically companies that would work with ill-reputed businesses. But they are companies that are forward-thinking and want to use the latest technologies to help them identify new songs and talent.

If you still have questions, get in touch with our team via support@musicxray.com and we’ll be happy to provide additional information. Bookmark this post and consider sharing it with fellow musicians. As a small company, we don’t have big PR budgets. Help us make sure all musicians know about a music tech company leveling the playing field by posting this to Facebook, Twitter, or just getting involved in our affiliate program and earning some money to offset your submission costs here on Music Xray.

Here at Music Xray, we’re all about transparency and about managing expectations. Sometimes people ask why they occasionally get the same response from different music industry professionals. So, we thought we’d take this opportunity to peek behind the curtain.

When an industry professional receives a song, they can hear the track, read any lyrics you’ve uploaded, read your bio, see your video (if you have one), check your Next Big Sound statistics, view the rest of your profile and songs on Music Xray (if they choose) and then, they are presented with three choices: Select, Hold, and Not Select.

Obviously, the more information you fill out in your song presentation profiles, the better impression you make with industry professionals. You should always include your lyrics, a photo or an image and even a video if you have one. You should always put your best foot forward.

Select: If your song is selected, you are alerted via email that your song has been selected and a pathway to communicate with the industry professional is opened. That allows you to begin a dialog and to close the deal. It’s important however to be respectful, patient, and courteous. You would be surprised to learn how many deals go south after a song has already been selected simply due to the industry professional deciding they’d rather not work with the artist. Remember, there are a lot of songs and artists out there, and while you should seek and expect a good deal, being “easy to work with” and “low maintenance” goes a long way.

Hold: This simply means the industry professional has put their decision on hold. You are free to continue to submit your song elsewhere. When your song is on hold, the industry professional will receive an email every 10 days reminding them they have your song on hold and that you are awaiting a final decision. Keep in mind that songs can remain on hold for a long time. This is especially true in television and film. It can take 18 months sometimes between when music supervisors begin looking for music and when the movie is done and final music selection begins.

Not Select: When an industry professional does not select a song, they are prompted with the screen you see in the image to the right. There, they can write their own reason for not selecting the song, or they can choose from one of the standard, but polite responses we provide. We provide these short answers because they are typical reasons songs are often not selected and part of what makes our system so appealing to industry professionals is that we make it so quick and easy.

We acknowledge that such a short response can sometimes be underwhelming to the submitter. It’s important to remember that before Music Xray, getting a guaranteed listen from an industry professional much less a response of any kind was unheard of. We will continue to make improvements where / as we can. In the meantime, if you’re seeking a longer and more detailed response to your song, we provide you a way to submit to industry professionals for song critiques and career coaching. When you submit to those drop boxes, you can expect much more detailed responses and perhaps even enter a dialog with the professional on the other side.

Once the industry professional has made their choice, we show them the next screen where they are asked to rate your song on each of five separate criteria. These ratings do not go directly back to you because we’ve found that industry professionals may sugar-coat their ratings if they know you will see them. Instead, we show you the average of the ratings once your song has been submitted to five separate opportunities and five professionals have rated your song.

That way, no industry professional is singled out for their rating and we feel an average of five ratings gives you an accurate reflection of how your track is being received by the industry. If you don’t like the ratings you’re receiving, you must face the fact that the ratings come from professionals you’ve selected. Presumabaly they are into your style and genre or you would not have submitted your music to them in the first place. It’s kind of hard to argue that the ratings aren’t an accurate reflection of how your music is perceived. If your ratings are good, keep submitting. If they are bad, consider getting some help from other industry professionals or consider submitting another track in the future.

Lastly, the ratings are used by the industry professionals themselves. They can log in to the “collective ratings” section of their account and see the ratings of all the other professionals and they can adjust the filters to suit what they are seeking. For example, they can adjust the filters to show them all the songs that have been reviewed and rated by at least 10 other industry professionals in the past month. They can also adjust the filters to show them only the songs that get high ratings on certain criteria. If hit potential isn’t important to a particular industry professional, they can adjust
the filter to disregard hit potential as a search criteria.

This feature enables the industry professionals to leverage each others’ filtering capability and expertise. Many of the deals that get done on Music Xray are a direct result of professionals finding the tracks they are seeking in this section, so for you, having multiple good ratings from five or more industry professionals can be the key to getting contacted when you least expect it. This is called “crowd-sourcing” and Music Xray is the only company to ever have successfully crowd-sourced the music industry. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. Industry professionals visit this section of the site daily to scoop the cream off the top.

So, there you go… a peek behind the curtain at Music Xray. I hope this was interesting and helpful. If it was, please click the little Facebook “like” button below or the share options and help us spread the word.